By Laureen Lazarovici

After gaining valuable skills through AFL-CIO organizing training, young activists are taking leading roles in ensuring a vibrant union movement.

Facing stagnant wages, cutbacks in benefits and layoffs in industries as diverse as manufacturing and telecommunications, more workers than ever are fighting for a voice on the job through union membership. But unscrupulous employers often try to block workers’ efforts to organize unions. A new generation of union organizers is helping workers overcome these obstacles—and they are learning the skills they need at two AFL-CIO programs to train future organizers: Union Summer and the Organizing Institute.

Just completing its seventh year, Union Summer is a five-week internship for college students and union members who seek hands-on organizing experience. Following a one-week training, a diverse group of interns joins union campaigns across the country as part of active organizing and first-contract campaigns. This year, more than 70 percent of Union Summer interns were people of color. The Organizing Institute, which began in 1989, is an intensive training and apprenticeship program for activists dedicated to becoming full-time organizers.

Thousands of activists have graduated from these programs, deepening their commitment to social and economic justice and joining workers’ fight for a union voice at work. The three activists profiled in the following pages are among those invigorating the union movement with their energy, enthusiasm and experience.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Turning commitment into action

At age 9, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins learned the value of a union. Her mother, who had been struggling to raise her family on welfare, found a union job that offered health insurance benefits and paid $10 an hour.

“I remember thinking, 'What are we going to do with all that money?’ ” says Ellis-Lamkins, who is the new executive officer of the South Bay (Calif.) Labor Council and executive director of Working Partnerships, a public policy think tank. “There was a sense of comfort, a sense of security,” she says.

Eleven years after first experiencing the union difference, Ellis-Lamkins signed up for Union Summer and was assigned to work at the labor council, helping home health care workers win a union with SEIU Local 715. “I was a Union Summer intern here in 1996, and I never left,” she says. After earning progressively more responsibility, Ellis-Lamkins took the labor council helm in January. At 27, she’s the youngest leader of a large labor council, a distinction once held by her predecessor and mentor, Amy Dean, who moved back to her hometown of Chicago to write a book about Working Partnerships, which Dean spearheaded in San Jose.

“In Union Summer, you get the tools” to become an effective organizer, Ellis-Lamkins says, including learning the best ways to conduct phone banks and carry out house visits to potential union members.

During her Union Summer internship, Ellis-Lamkins saw firsthand why workers want unions—and how their lives improve after they win a voice on the job. She took part in a spirited legislative, political and organizing campaign, helping pass legislation that made it possible for the state’s home care workers to win bargaining rights. Since then, workers in Santa Clara, San Benito and many other California counties have joined AFSCME and SEIU and today are covered by strong contracts, earning $11 an hour, up from minimum wage.

California’s home care workers now experience the union difference, as Ellis-Lamkins did as a child. “I got to be in marching band and Girl Scouts,” she says. “Those 'extras’ make a difference in a kid’s life.” Union Summer helped her turn commitment into action. “If we can do that for others, that’s what matters.”

Willie Gonzalez: Listening to workers

Level playing field: Being a union organizer means “You have those moments that stay with you forever,” says Willie Gonzalez.

Toward the end of his 1999 apprenticeship with the Organizing Institute in Miami, Willie Gonzalez met a worker active in the union campaign at the Goya Foods distribution warehouse who faced stiff obstacles to getting a home loan. In an attempt to win the worker’s allegiance away from the union, a warehouse manager offered to help him qualify for a loan.

“It shook him,” Gonzalez says. “I went to his house and talked to him.” Over pizza, the two men discussed the importance of having a union voice on the job. The next day, the worker turned down the company’s offer, continued handing out union leaflets and pledged never to give up.

Forming a union “wasn’t about the money to him,” says Gonzalez. “It was about respect.” Since taking part in the Organizing Institute, Gonzalez says, “You have those moments when you see people rise up, and those moments stay with you forever.”

Today, Gonzalez is an organizing supervisor with UNITE in Dallas, overseeing three other organizers. Gonzalez and his team help mobilize UNITE members in manufacturing plants and industrial laundries by recruiting, identifying and training shop stewards, offering workshops on immigrant workers’ rights and even fielding union soccer teams.

Before signing up for the Organizing Institute’s three-day training program, Gonzalez met union activists in Florida while working with a community group to mobilize voters around a ballot initiative for health care reform. But he didn’t know much about union organizing.
A persistent union leader convinced Gonzalez to consider union organizing. “People tend to rise up and fight more in the workplace than in other environments, because it is their living.”

Gonzalez says the most important skill he learned at the Organizing Institute is listening to workers. Would-be organizers often try to “talk somebody into” joining a union, says Gonzalez. But organizers are much more effective when they listen to workers speak from the heart about the problems they face on the job—low wages, no benefits, no voice.

“People organize themselves,” Gonzalez says.

Paul Stuart: His goal is organizing

Standing with nurses: Union Summer intern Paul Stuart plans a future in union organizing.

Taking a break from college a few years ago, Paul Stuart went back to his hometown near Syracuse, N.Y., where he got a job as an assistant aquatics director at the local recreation center—and an inkling of what it’s like having no voice at work.

When the recreation center started cutting back on the quality of programs it offered to the community, Stuart voiced his disapproval. “They really didn’t care what I had to say. They would seem receptive, but it was just for show,” he says. “As an employee, there was nothing I could do to change the situation. It was very frustrating.”

This year, Stuart signed up for a Union Summer internship in Kansas City, Mo., where he realized this same frustration extends to many workers who do not have union contracts. Some 600 nurses at three HCA hospitals who first voted for a union with AFT in November 2000 still had no first contract when Stuart and his fellow interns arrived this summer.

“The nurses had been telling managers about understaffing for years, and it changed absolutely nothing,” says Stuart. Without a union, “You can go to management as much as you want, but they don’t have to listen. The nurses formed a union because it was the only way for them to have a voice.”

Stuart was among six Union Summer interns mobilizing religious and political allies together for a neighborhood barbeque and candlelight vigil in support of a first contract. Stuart also had to contact nurses to urge them to take part. “We’d call back and call back and call back,” he says. “And then we’d call again to reconfirm.” During their persistent phone banking, Stuart caught a glimpse of the nurses’ working conditions. “The nurses are working 12- to 14-hour shifts, and they are exhausted,” he says.

The Union Summer interns felt exhilarated when they canvassed neighborhoods near the hospital asking residents to display yard signs showing support for the nurses, Stuart says. But when they knocked on doors on the streets where managers live, he says, “it was shocking to see how unreceptive people were” to the nurses’ struggle for a voice on the job.

Now that his internship is over and he’s back in class at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Stuart says he plans to learn Spanish because many of the most exciting organizing campaigns involve Spanish-speaking immigrant workers. He also wants to apply to the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute to build more skills. “I definitely want to do union organizing,” he says. “I want to be directly involved.”

In September, only weeks after Stuart's Union Summer internship ended, the nurses won their first contract.@